Newt Gingrich (10/23/08):

VAN SUSTEREN: Is Governor Palin the victim of blatant unfair treatment across the board? Joining us live is former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who has just released a new documentary about America’s energy future called “We Have the Power.”

Mr. Speaker, nice to see you. And what do you make of CNN’s reporter getting it really wrong and so insultingly wrong? And we haven’t seen an apology yet to Governor Palin. But what do you think about it?

NEWT GINGRICH (R), FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Well, I think the elite media’s attack on Governor Palin again and again has been factually wrong, intellectually dishonest, totally biased, worthy of the Polish state news media attacking Lech Walesa back in the 1980s. I mean, this is a kind of deliberate, vicious, dishonest, total distortion of who Governor Palin is, including, by the way, the “Saturday Night Live” skits, some of which I think were slander and were worthy of a lawsuit.

Newt Gingrich Lawsuit Culture:

Americans are not losing their minds, but they are afraid of using their minds. They are afraid to exercise judgment — afraid of being sued.
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By the mid-1970s, writes Philip K. Howard, due process “had become a kind of legal airbag inflating instantly” to protect individuals aggrieved about any adverse encounter with authority. Howard’s book, “The Collapse of the Common Good: How America’s Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom,” is a compendium of the social havoc caused by the flight from making common-sense judgments. Americans now “tiptoe through the day,” fearful that an angry individual with a lawyer will extort money from society while imposing irrational rules on society.